My Journey to Love
Hello, my name is Matt, or Matthew, or sometimes even Mateo, depending on my mood and the environment I’m in 🤣. I teach yoga and meditation here at the Abbey, and it’s been a long, strange, winding journey that led me here. My journey started on a worldly path, studying biology, training to be a…
How Loving Ourselves Helps Us Make Better Choices
Do you ever feel haunted by compulsive, self-defeating behaviors? These can range from obviously self-destructive patterns of alcohol or drug abuse to more subtly unhealthy relationships with food, people, work, or even exercise. All too often, we’re faced with a temptation to indulge in some type of instant gratification that we know – deep down…
A Simple Practice to Break through the Protective Shell around our Hearts
In our last post: A Simple Practice to Discover how Deeply you Love Yourself, we discussed the struggle many of us face in loving ourselves. The simple act of looking at ourself in the mirror and saying “I love you” is often challenging, because the concept of unconditionally loving ourselves, exactly as we are, is…
A Simple Practice to Discover how Deeply we Love Ourselves
When we struggle to love ourselves, all of our other relationships – romantic, familial, friendly – will be troubled as well. Here is a free, simple practice to help us assess our relationship with our own heart. No, it’s not an online questionnaire with a bunch of multiple-choice answers that never quite express the nuances…
Embracing Love for our Experience: Loving Negative Emotions
Embracing Love, Part 2 Last week we discussed Embracing Love for Ourselves: Overcoming Guilt and Shame as the first step in embracing Love and joining in the New Spiritual Awakening that is rippling through humanity. We’ll talk more about loving ourselves in the future, but if we’re struggling to love the current experience we are…
Embracing Love for Ourselves: Overcoming Guilt and Shame
Embracing Unconditional Love, Part 1 Last week in our post on the New Spiritual Awakening, we discussed the wave of awakening that is rippling through humanity, a rebirth of consciousness based on Unconditional Love. I gushed on and on about the wonders of Love and the hope it brings for humanity. But you might be…
The New Spiritual Awakening
We are living in the midst of a new spiritual awakening. Can you feel it? Have you felt the shift in our collective unconscious? The pandemic broke something loose, it shattered our false sense of security and gave us all an undeniable lesson in the impermanence of life, the fragility of society. We now have…
More Embracing Love
Abbey of the Redwoods 